Tuesday, June 5, 2012

We have been
witnessing the milestones achieved in the field of software engineering with
the help of the scrum development process regarding the development of the
agile projects. There is no doubt regarding the efficiency of the scrum
development process in the terms of agility.

It supports all the
principles as stated by the agile manifesto for all the development
methodologies and processes falling under the category of the agile software
development processes.

Initially the scrum approach to development was
considered to be a holistic but eventually in by the year of 1995 it achieved
its present form and was officially termed as the “SCRUM”.

Scrum Development Cycle

The scrum
methodology consists of various stages and processes that we are going to
discuss in this article. The scrum development cycle is constituted of the
below mentioned processes:

Creation of the product back log

Creation
of the sprint back log

Sprint

Delivery
of a shippable working increment of the software system or application.

- The product
back log can be thought of as an ordered list of the requirements and
specifications of the software product or the system that is to be developed and
its creation is the responsibility of the product owner.

- The product owner
orders some product back log items and these items only are mentioned in the
product back log.

-The product owner may order these product back log items
based on any one of the following criteria:

Risk

Business
value

Date
needed

Dependencies
and so on.

What is Product Back Log?

- The product
back log is a list that is open to every one and all are free to edit it but,
for any kind of changes and ordering the items, only the product owner is only held
responsible.

- Apart from the requirements, the rough estimates of the
development efforts and business values are found in the product back log.

- All
these values appear in the back log but in the form of some story points
developed by the means of some rounded Fibonacci sequence.

- With the help of
these estimates the product owner is able to gauge the time line and influence
the ordering of the back log items.

- Contrary to all this, the efforts required for
completing each back log item is estimated by the development team.

What is Sprint Back Log?

- It can be
thought of as a list of work or tasks that must be addressed by the development
team in the sprint that is to follow.

- The sprint back log is prepared by
obtaining some selective features and stories form the product back log until
the sprint includes enough tasks to be accomplished.

- But while adding the tasks
the velocity of the previous sprints should be taken care of by the development
team.

- The stories or the features are broken down in to smaller tasks that up
on estimation would not exceed 16 hours of efforts by the development team.

- This
reduces the burden on the development team and helps them understand what is to
be done.

- Rather than assigning the tasks on the sprint back log, they are just
signed up by the development team as required for the following sprint and
according to the priority and skills of the development team.

- The working
increment that is delivered at the end of the sprint is the sum of all the
product back log items that have been completed during that particular sprint
and all the other sprints preceding it.

- It is necessary that the increment is delivered in a working condition and is
usable.